Translator: Kathleen Trautwein Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
So, the weather of the world is changing, in case you hadn't noticed.
And in case you hadn't noticed, it's probably not getting better.
As the weather gets worse and worse,
and as our relationship with our most precious natural resource,
not oil, water,
as it gets more and more extreme,
so that we have too much water or too little water,
and now often in the same place.
As storms get more severe and less predictable,
a word that you are going to be hearing
more and more often
from planners, policy officials - well, some policy officials -
(Laughter)
is resilience.
What does it mean to be resilient?
Now, it turns out that we really like our superheroes to be resilient.
A classic superhero, like my friend Hercules here,
suffers near-death experiences but bounces back stronger than ever
to accomplish incredible feats and conquer monsters -
that's the superhero, almost every one, archetypally.
But what does it mean for a city, for a community,
for a region to be resilient?
Notoriously complex, as cities are,
and often more like the monster than the superhero.
Well, it turns out that throughout history,
great cities have exhibited incredible resilience multiple times.
The city of London, the historic heart of London,
burned almost completely to the ground
in four days in September of 1666,
and less than a century later, like the superhero,
it was back bigger and better than ever.
Already one of the biggest cities that the world had ever known
and destined for further industrial and imperial greatness.
London, it turns out, was getting to the top of its game
and so was naturally resilient.
But when hurricane Katrina in August of 2005 hit the Gulf coast
after devastating the Caribbean,
it was a somewhat different story
in cities like Biloxi and, notoriously, New Orleans.
What that catastrophe did
was not to reveal the hidden strength, the resilience of a community,
but to expose for all to see, in their rawness,
the underlying stress, the inequality, the injustice,
the unmet challenges of a particular community.
So, seven years later,
hurricane Sandy dealt another blow,
this time to the most populous
and arguably critical region of the United States,
the Northeast.
And it is often said in the disaster response business
that it takes not one, but two catastrophes
for everybody to finally sit up and take notice.
And of course, it doesn't hurt to flood Lower Manhattan -
it tends to get certain people's attention.
Suddenly, we were having at a more urgent level
a conversation that was quietly going on for a very long time.
The awareness, of how much of the world's population,
how much of the world's critical infrastructure,
how much of our resources, human and otherwise,
was concentrated heavily in the coastal areas of the world.
And this was true par excellence along our own Northeast corridor.
If you didn't actually live on the coast,
you were and are most likely totally dependent
on power structures, transportation structures, health services
that are heavily concentrated along that coast.
So, we are all in this situation together.
And images like this started to show up for cities around the world,
projecting how much of the cities that we know,
the communities that we inhabit,
would be flooded
in the case of that dreaded, hypothetical 100-year storm.
Now, our response was hardwired into our culture.
Since the industrial era,
we've tended to treat big problems with even bigger solutions.
If we can build a bridge between Staten Island and Queens,
can't we build a flood barrier that keeps out that storm surge?
Well, this is our natural response,
but once upon a time, traditional civilizations
had a more balanced relationship with water and its vagaries.
Ancient Egypt,
the source of nourishment, the source of fertility
was, of course, the seasonal flooding of the Nile river.
It was both a threat but also a blessing.
In Venice, even today,
when the Acqua alta comes, the high water,
they simply get out the temporary walkways,
and tourists and local residents keep their feet dry
for as long as the water is in the Piazza.
But in most of the world, certainly in recent years,
the instinct is to punish the bad water, to put the river in prison.
After the flood, to build levees, to build flood walls,
to build big infrastructure
that attempts, at least, to make the problem go away.
To make it so that when we wake up the next morning,
we feel safe again, we feel protected.
The water is out of mind and largely, by the way, out of sight as well.
And then it fails.
And suddenly we wake up
to the devastating inner connectedness of all these systems.
Health care, emergency services, transportation.
The lights that we read by,
that fuel our increasingly electronic and digital life.
So, when in 2012 the lights went off in New York,
they at least temporarily went on in Washington, D.C.
And then Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Shaun Donovan,
with the support
of the former Dutch director of Spatial Planning and Water Management -
it's a Dutch thing - (Laughter)
announced and launched a program,
a competition, actually,
challenging the design professions -
architecture, landscape architecture, planning, engineering -
to come up with innovative solutions promoting resilience, real resilience,
not by just rebuilding and responding to the latest catastrophe,
but actually dynamically putting in place
innovative ideas
that anticipated and provided for the next one.
That competition ran for part of a year.
I was a member of a team that submitted a proposal.
The proposals were exhibited and judged,
and then some of them were in fact actually funded.
Not at a level that would make that kind of storm event
an entirely survivable thing,
but in an appropriately experimental mode.
Not surprisingly,
the biggest funding went to the New York region,
which had been so hard hit by Sandy,
and to some extent, the Jersey shore.
And the most press attention went to the big engineering solutions, of course.
How about building a set of new barrier islands across New York harbor?
Spectacular!
How about building an architecturally active wall
of new cultural institutions around Lower Manhattan?
Inspiring.
The problem is that cities like New York, Lower Manhattan,
largely take care of themselves.
Chicago, for example, like London in a previous century,
burned to the ground completely in 1871.
But within two decades, the city was back, bigger and better than ever.
Why?
Because again, it had built into it the essential ingredients of resilience,
not just protection from fires or storms,
but a robust economy, an entrepreneurial community,
social and civic institutions
which responded in a proactive and positive way -
all of those things.
Lower Manhattan will take care of itself, eventually.
It has exhibited extraordinary and inspiring resilience
in the face, as you know,
of very dramatic catastrophes in recent years.
But what about a city like Bridgeport, Connecticut?
which before it ever got hit by hurricane Irene in 2011
and then Sandy again in 2012
had suffered the biggest catastrophe of all:
deindustrialization.
Loss of its economic base; loss of its sense of identity;
built around industry and innovation -
gone.
And then to add insult to injury,
it finds itself
one of the poorest cities in the United States,
smack in the middle of one of the richest economies,
one of the richest counties.
Now, those of you who have commercial or residential real estate experience
can do the back-of-the-envelope map.
When trouble comes, when you have to respond or rebuild,
Who is going to take care of themselves and who needs outside assistance?
So, Bridgeport's storms, like New Orleans' storms, revealed underlying stresses.
And when we started to study the problem, it got even more dramatic.
This is the 100-year flood map,
and you can see how much of Bridgeport, in a twelve foot surge -
and you see our friend there leaning against the elevation indicator
in the South End neighborhood, where we're working -
how much of it is really vulnerable and exposed.
Beautiful little, apparently stable, but in fact, quite marginal and delicate,
fragile residential enclaves like Seaside Village periodically flood.
In fact, it turns out that Seaside Village, beautiful as it is,
was built on landfill, as emergency wartime workers housing
in the First World War.
And when it rains or storms,
Seaside Village gets it from every direction.
It gets it from the ocean, it gets it from the creek,
it gets it from the sky, of course,
and the upland water that's coming down on it,
but it also gets it from below.
It has a high water table;
it is built on a very soft fill.
So, flooding is not just a simple problem of stopping the storm,
it's a comprehensive problem.
And it turns out that cities had a kind of native intelligence.
If you look at old maps of places like Bridgeport and New Orleans -
surprise! -
people built on the high ground, not in the salt marshes.
We've only done that in the twentieth and continuing into the twenty-first century.
So, it seems natural to say, well, just retreat to the high ground.
Of course, if you don't already live on the low ground,
like so many of the challenged residents of Bridgeport
The other natural response,
which is wonderful if you have the resources,
is build the big wall.
It's not just the immigrants.
(Laughter)
Build the Dutch style wall.
Now, we've learned a lot from the Dutch,
but in North America with our thousands of miles of complicated coastline,
our diverse communities, our political disagreements -
think about the politics of coastal protection and recent political events,
the coasts, the middle of the country, the coasts -
that solution is not at least immediately available to us.
And so, as we began work in Bridgeport, we had a much softer idea,
an idea that was about adaptation and evolution
rather than fortification and resistance.
It was forced upon us by the reality of the situation,
by economic necessity,
by the limited amount of resources that we were working with,
but also by the nature of the place.
One of the South End's great assets was a beautiful 1867 Olmsted park -
Olmsted's only waterfront park: Seaside Park -
which had been extended over time to 2.5 miles of coastal public land.
This was a natural buffer.
What we said to ourselves:
if we could take that green edge and extend it over time, comprehensively,
to protect and buffer from wave surge
as much of the complicated coastline of a city like Bridgeport as possible.
What if we could even extend it into the neighborhoods,
as a system of new public space and parks that managed water,
both stormwater and water from a surge
that managed that rather than simply trying to resist it.
It's a complicated system, and like any complicated design,
it's not at its most effective and particularly not at its most resilient
when it's somebody else's project.
So, this kind of work, we think,
of necessity and by its very nature,
involves community engagement,
involves listening to the local community,
but in the long run,
involves empowering the local community
because they are the ones
who are going to have to live going forward and manage going forward,
and take ownership of a new landscape design now,
not just to resist storms, and water, and catastrophe,
but to respond to it dynamically, to manage it, to store it
for when in dry periods we actually need it,
and that operates at a number of very local scales.
Water now is something that we don't simply put into pipes,
out of sight out of mind,
or fence off with gigantic pieces of engineering,
but that we manage at all levels through new kinds of public space,
through new kinds of streets that hold and manage water
rather than simply immediately depositing it
into our overburdened storm surge systems,
and even in our own backyards.
This is an approach which operates at a number of different scales
that need, like the storms and their damage,
itself to interact in complex, and as I've said, dynamic ways.
At the neighborhood scale, certainly.
It's local communities that need to understand now
the specific threats and vulnerabilities and risks that they face.
But also at the scale of the region.
We're all in this together,
particularly in New England.
We're all part of a large and complex coastal system.
At the end of the day, whether we like it or not,
the tide is rising,
these big storms are coming again,
they will most certainly come.
Thank you.
(Applause)